The List Universe Blog

At 1:19 we will hit the Geek section of Fark - it does not produce as much traffic as the main page, but it can produce a LOT on its own. Hopefully the site will stay up - but if it goes down you will know why. Rest assured I will be working to make sure it stays up - and two recent Fark front pages have not killed us - so fingers crossed! You can comment here if you wish and I will provide updates if they are needed.

This blog will not go down if the main site does - it is hosted on a different network.

The site is currently down - the sysadmins are on to it and it should be up soon. At the moment I am unsure of the cause. I will update again soon.

[Update] The site is now back up.

WARNING: at 5:53 PM Fark time (I don’t know what their time zone is) we are going to hit the front page of Fark with the 20 beers list. I have warned our SysAdmins - hopefully this will not cause difficulties or downtime. If it does, I may have to shut down comments until we can cope.

At the moment all links are broken on the site as the sysadmins are trying to fix hotlinking problems we have been experiencing. This should be fixed soon. Please stand by.

[Update]: This is now corrected - the hotlinks issue is ongoing and will hopefully not cause such a dramatically fault when it is being fixed.

[Update 2]: All faults are now fixed.

Last night there was a brief outage caused by a failure of a powersupply at Pacific Rack. It lasted for around 1 hour. It is nice to know it wasn’t our fault this time!

The Top 10 Bizarre Stories from the Bible has reached the front page of reddit (in record time!) - congratulations JT. Everyone cross your fingers that we can survive the onslaught of traffic - we are already past 12 MB/s and I have alerted the systems administrators to be on alert.

The article on reddit is here.

[Update] I should mention that the hosting company we use (Pacific Rack) are preparing a plan for me for going forward and coping with more traffic - I am hoping to hear from them on that by the end of today or tomorrow.

The site is now back up. Be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed on this site to keep abreast of problems that arise.

The site has gone down and I have requested a reboot - we have been hovering around the 10MB/s mark all day and I am guessing this will be a memory related problem. I should be hearing a little later today about what solutions Pacific Rack can offer to fix this for the long term.

[Update] According to Pacific Rack, we have a corrupt configuration file - the problem has been escalated and will hopefully be resolved quickly.

[Update 2] The webserver is back up but it appears that the configuration of the domains and subdomains is now all fried as listverse.com is taking me to the wrong place. What a disaster!

[Update 3] The site is still pointing to the wrong place! I have managed to get a note on the page it is wrongly pointing to to tell people to come here. Hopefully that is an acceptable interim solution.

[Update 4] 15:38 GMT: William (senior Linux administrator) is now investigating the problem - he has been extremely helpful before so I predict this will be resolved quite quickly.

Site Back Up - the site is now back up - it is running a little slow for me - but it is there! I have a new list to publish so I will do that now.

This is our new listverse blog - it is hosted directly on the wordpress servers so it will be active even if the main site goes down.

The reason for adding this blog is that we had another massive outage last night as a result of being featured on the front page of FoxNews.com. The listverse sysadmins are working on a plan to put an end to downtime once and for all! This will possibly involve a cluster of servers and a load balancer. There may be a few quirks over the next couple of days as we decide what to do and begin to implement it.

Thanks for your patience. Be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed for this blog so you can keep abreast of issues.